electric locomotive

major reference

Efforts to propel railroad vehicles using batteries date from 1835, but the first successful application of electric traction was in 1879, when an electric locomotive ran at an exhibition in Berlin. The first commercial applications of electric traction were for suburban or metropolitan railroads. One of the earliest came in 1895, when the Baltimore and Ohio electrified a stretch of track in...

railroads

In the first third of the 20th century electrification of standard railroads (which came first on the B&O in 1895) proceeded. Never as widespread as in Europe, electrification today is particularly associated with the northeastern United States. This regional concentration of electrification has meant that only between Boston and Washington, D.C., where the federally assembled Amtrak system...

...from North America and disappeared from western Europe’s national railroads when British Railways dispensed with it in 1968. In China the world’s only remaining steam locomotive factory switched to electric locomotive manufacture in 1991. Diesel-electric traction had become far more reliable and cheaper to run, though electric traction’s performance characteristics and operating costs were...

subway systems

...driven at a depth sufficient to avoid interference with building foundations or public-utility works, and there was no disruption of street traffic. The original plan called for cable operation, but electric traction was substituted before the line was opened. Operation began on this first electric underground railway in 1890 with a uniform fare of twopence for any journey on the 3-mile...

use by British Railways

...km) and cut personnel from about 475,000 to about 250,000. As part of a modernization program, steam locomotives began to be replaced by diesels in the 1950s, and this was followed in the ’60s by electrification. The board undertook track reconstruction, installed long, continuously welded rails, and introduced new signaling systems. A computerized freight service introduced in 1975 could...